Outdoor Accent Lighting
Outdoor accent lighting involves using different types and styles of outdoor garden lights to accentuate and highlight the best features of your landscape, yard or patio areas.
For example, suppose you have a flower garden in full bloom with a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. Why limit the pleasure of seeing its beauty to daylight hours? The same garden can be enjoyed after dark with well-placed accent lighting. While the colors will not show up as bright, naturally, the lush textures and silhouettes of the plants can be shown to great advantage. You can enjoy an entirely different aspect to your garden and landscape features during nighttime.
Other features, such as statuary, fountains, interesting pathways and sitting areas can also be illuminated with outdoor accent lighting. Some people like to highlight interesting trees around their lot. This requires a bit more expertise in choosing the right fixtures and placement, but the effect can be both intriguing and beautiful. Once you begin to focus on your night-time landscape, outdoor accent lighting ideas will quickly come to you.
Types of Accent Lighting
The types of lights that serve the purpose include pathway lights, bollard lights, spotlights, well lights and tree lights (or moonlights). Post lighting and outdoor pole lights can sometimes serve as accent lights, especially if they are not too bright and not too high. Lights can be placed in the ground or mounted to a tree, wall, statue, fountain or another fixed, sturdy base.
Design, Ideas and Tips
The secret of accent outdoor lighting are placement and angle. Using small flashlights can help you test placement and angle of the lighting that highlight the most interesting features of your landscape. It can also demonstrate how much these two factors influence the overall effect of your accent lighting project. For example, direct downlighting illuminates the tops of plants and objects and casts shadows underneath. Moving the lights just slightly right, left up or down can change things considerably and makes it quite interesting to “play” with lighting in this fashion.
You will want a soft look that allows you to build effects, and also brightness, by adding fixtures rather than by adding wattage. Also keep in mind that the lighting source itself can be either visible or invisible to the viewer. Some of the most effective designs include hiding the fixture under the object it illuminates… or having a covered light source that is turned away from the viewer.
Pathway light fixtures can be the first step in designing outdoor accent lighting. They will allow you and your visitors to tour your yard in comfort to view the rest of the landscape. A path draws people directly to where you want them to go. At that destination, a lovely scene greets them with artistically arranged lighting that casts soft spotlights on your best elements and intriguing shadows all around. Whether this is a bench, a statue, a group of plants, a single shrub or tree… is up to you and your imagination.
Lighting Options for Accent Lights
While the warm look of halogen lights may give you the cozy look, LED lights can also be very effective, as their cooler areas of the spectrum can imitate moonlight. LED lighting also allows you to put more fixtures on a wire, as they lower wattage and energy usage.
Outdoor solar lights are almost ideal for accent lighting. Why almost? Well, the flexibility and ease of installation makes them perfect companions for your lighting designs and to test various positioning and focus. But in shaded areas it might be more difficult for them to get the full charge needed for long-lasting shine. There are solutions to this which are discussed elsewhere. However, if you are looking for accent lighting in full sun areas, then you are in luck. Solar fixtures come in all shapes and sizes and the best ones (but also the most expensive) have more powerful photocells and bulbs.